The Office of Legal Counsel: Law, Politics, Ethics, and Structure Barry Sullivan* In 2001, I rejoined my law firm after spending seven years as a law teacher and administrator and was soon asked to consult on a litigated matter involving a corporate client. I reviewed the relevant materials and met with the litigation team. I told them that I did not find one of their arguments to be persuasive, and that I did not think that a judge would be persuaded either. I suggested an alternative line of argument that seemed more promising to me. After the meeting, a young lawyer who exuded self-confidence took me aside. He thought I should know that the world of law practice had changed during the years I was away, that the theory I found unpersuasive had been developed by in-house counsel, and that our job, in this new world of law practice, was just to make the arguments we were told to make. Quoting Marshall Field, the young lawyer pronounced that our job was to “give the lady what she wants.”1 I doubt that his perspective was shared by most of my colleagues, but it was a viewpoint that clearly had traction for some, even if few would have presented it so baldly.2 I recalled that conversation recently, when I read about the oral argument in Kareem v. Haspel.3 In Kareem, a United States citizen who works as a journalist in Syria brought suit in federal court to ascertain whether the government had targeted him for summary execution by drone strike under an Obama-era Presidential Policy Guidance.4 The government’s argument on appeal did not * Cooney & Conway Chair in Advocacy and George Anastaplo Professor of Constitutional Law and History, Loyola University Chicago. The author is grateful to Alfred C. Aman, Jr., Dianne Avery, Christine Kexel Chabot, John C. Dehn, Michael J. Kaufman, Alfred S. Konefsky, Jacob Morse, Alan Raphael, and Spencer Waller, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan for comments on an earlier draft, and to Kynat Akram and Savannah Theil for excellent research assistance. The author is also thanks the Cooney & Conway Chair Fund and the Loyola Faculty Research Fund for financial support. The usual stipulation applies. 1 See LLOYD WENDT & HERMAN KOGAN, GIVE THE LADY WHAT SHE WANTS! THE STORY OF MARSHALL FIELD & COMPANY 223 (1952). Anthony Trollope describes a male character’s view of lawyering in similar terms: “Bold … merely wanted a man who knew the forms of law, and who would do what he was told for his money. He had no idea of putting himself in the hands of a lawyer. He wanted law from a lawyer as he did a coat from a tailor, because he could not make it so well himself.” ANTHONY TROLLOPE, THE WARDEN 28 (Everyman’s Library ed. 1907). The sexism of Marshall Field’s remark would be amplified by later generations of marketers. See LIZABETH COHEN, A CONSUMERS’ REPUBLIC: THE POLITICS OF MASS CONSUMPTION IN POSTWAR AMERICA 314 (2003) (“Behavioral differences between the sexes had origins, they argued, that extended beyond the social and cultural to psychological and even physiological. In 1958, for example, Janet Wolff claimed … that women were marked as shoppers by biology – reproductive systems and sexual characteristics, size and muscular power, proportions and acute senses – mediated by distinctive personality traits like intuition, compassion, loyalty, and irrationality. … While marketers subjected female customers to this kind of psychological analysis, often aimed at their insecurities, they credited men as a market segment with authority and financial resources, but spared them the same mental probing.”). 2 See MODEL RULES OF PROF’L CONDUCT R. 2.1. If the argument had been frivolous (which it was not), that would have raised a different issue for the litigation team. See id., R. 3.1. 3 See Kareem v. Haspel, No. 19-5328 (D.C. Cir.). 4 See PROCEDURES FOR APPROVING DIRECT ACTION AGAINST TERRORIST TARGETS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES AND AREAS OF ACTIVE HOSTILITIES, May 22, 2013, https://www.justice.gov/oip/foialibrary/procedures_for_approving_direct_action_against_terrorist_targets/download . The 2013 Policy Guidance was originally classified “Top Secret,” but was finally made public, pursuant to a court order, in 2016; it was based on a 2010 Office of Legal Counsel opinion. See Karen DeYoung, Newly declassified document sheds light on how president approves drone strikes, WASH. POST, Aug. 6, 2016, 1 address the merits. Instead, the government argued that Kareem lacked standing to sue, and that his claims were barred by the political question doctrine and the state secrets privilege. At oral argument in the District of Columbia Circuit, at least one judge expressed incredulity at the government’s position: “Judge Patricia Millett characterized the DOJ’s argument as giving the government the ability to ‘unilaterally decide to kill U.S. citizens,’ according to coverage of the argument by Courthouse News Service. ‘Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is?’”5 If the government’s assertion of non-reviewability seemed new, the underlying, substantive policy was not. The Presidential Policy Guidance involved in Kareem was based on a classified memorandum, which was prepared in 2010 by the Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”), the division of the Justice Department tasked with giving legal advice to the executive branch,6 and endorsed the President’s authority to target U.S. citizens believed to be terrorists.7 Neither the legality nor the wisdom of that policy was initially opened to debate outside the executive branch.8 Like much of OLC’s work product, the memorandum was not intended for public consumption, and its conclusions were not likely to be tested in court.9 Indeed, the government made every effort to https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/newly-declassified-document-sheds-light-on-how- president-approves-drone-strikes/2016/08/06/f424fe50-5be0-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html (“The document’s dry, bureaucratic language seems in stark contrast to the presumably dire consequences of the actions it outlines, and it leaves a number of questions unanswered. What appears to be a description of information to be included in the profile of an individual target is blacked out.”) An earlier version of the 2010 OLC memorandum was prepared in late 2009. See Charlie Savage, Court Releases Large Parts of Memo Approving Killing of American in Yemen, N.Y. TIMES, June 23, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/us/justice-department-found-it-lawful-to- target-anwar-al-awlaki.html. 5 See Debra Cassens Weiss, US can kill its own citizens without review when state secrets are involved, DOJ lawyer argues, ABA JOURNAL, Nov. 18, 2020, https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/doj-lawyer-argues-us-can-kill-its- own-citizens-without-review-when-state-secrets-are-involved. Kareem’s lawyer argued that, "Whether that’s in a parking lot in the United States or abroad in Syria, the government has claimed—for the first time ever in this case— that it has unfettered and unreviewable discretion to kill US citizens at will.” Id. 6 See 28 U.S.C. § 510; 28 C.F.R. § 0.25. 7 See Office of Legal Counsel, Memorandum for the Attorney General Re: Applicability of Federal Criminal Laws and the Constitution to Contemplated Lethal Operations Against Shaykh Anwar al-Aulaqi, July 16, 2010, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/pages/attachments/2015/04/02/2010-07-16_-_olc_aaga_barron_-_al- aulaqi.pdf. For a thoughtful defense of the government’s policy (if not its reasoning), see H. JEFFERSON POWELL, TARGETING AMERICANS: THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE U.S. DRONE WAR 145-46 (2016) (“[T]he Obama administration turned to an antiseptic language about a ‘balancing of interests’ that lacks even the basic candor without which law becomes a meaningless charade: The administration was not trying to respect or take into account al- Awlaki’s interests but to destroy them. The killing was constitutional, and it may have been wise, but we should not pretend that it was something it was not.”). President Obama gave a full-throated defense of the policy at the University of Chicago Law School in April 2016. See CNN, Clip of President Obama Town Hall Meeting on the Supreme Court, April 7, 2016, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4587864/user-clip-drone-response. 8 Although the document was classified, the government’s actions pursuant to the document soon became the subject of scholarly and professional debate. See Ryan Alford, John Dehn, Gregory McNeal & Carlton Larson, Targeted Killing and the Rule of Law, CATO UNBOUND, June 2011, https://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/june-2011/targeted- killing-rule-law; John C. Dehn & Kevin Jon Heller, Targeted Killing: The Case of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, 159 PENNUMBRA 175 (2011). 9 OLC has published a selection of opinions since 1977. See H. JEFFERSON POWELL, THE CONSTITUTION AND THE ATTORNEYS GENERAL xv n.2 (1999). However, not all OLC opinions are made public, and some are made public long after the fact. See, e.g., Note, The Immunity-Conferring Power of the Office of Legal Counsel, 121 HARV. L. REV. 2086, 2090 (2008). 2 ensure that the memorandum would remain secret.10 Why was the government so reluctant to have the extent of the President’s legal power debated in public? Was this legitimate legal advice or an example of what one commentator has called “a jurisprudence of mere political expedience, engaging in … opportunistic, situational constitutionalism through which lawyers advance whatever arguments support the president’s immediate agenda”?11 In other words, was it simply a case of “giving the lady what she wants”? As a legal strategy, “giving the lady what she wants” is dubious enough when it comes to representing a corporate client in private law litigation that will eventually be decided by an impartial decisionmaker after an adversary proceeding.12 The strategy is even more dubious, however, when one is a public official charged with providing legal advice that is not likely to be made public, let alone scrutinized by a disinterested adjudicator.13 Introduction OLC does not have the final word concerning any government policy.